Totems and Talismans
by jessisparks2315
Summary: A series of drabbles centering on Ariadne and Arthur.
1. 2 AM

**1. 2 a.m. **  
It is a strange feeling, to wake from perfectly-recalled chaos into this orderly world, this compulsively neat hotel sitting room, but Arthur said (in the same tone as every one of her professors) that practice makes perfect, and she _is _tired of being torn apart by projections of various kinds every time she loses focus and lets her creativity get the better of her.

She should have known that Arthur's projections would be perfect tacticians. They were, after all, extensions of his own subconscious. He apologizes the first two times they wake, but she laughs and thanks him for having such precise projections. One of Eames' projections had missed her head the first time it shot at her, in one of their early trials, and she had taken the bullet in the shoulder instead. It was not an experience she ever wanted to repeat, so when Arthur's projections take her down without her feeling a thing, she is more grateful than alarmed.

It is two AM the third time that they wake, in the night lights of Paris, and under these fallen stars she walks back to her own tiny apartment, watching the buildings fold and crumble into the scenes behind her eyes.


	2. Metaphor

"The dreamspace," he says, the pressure of his hand on hers increasing with each word, "is clay, and you are the sculptor."

_(She recalls the touch of his fingers across her face and thinks that he is the artist_) And the world, the dreamscape, is hollow and empty until she fills it with the world she has begun to create for herself. 

_(And neither of them knows it, but it is for him, as well.)_


	3. Sky

He smiles at her; the full breadth of the half-smile she's seen him wear so many times, the one that he gives her when she's learned something new. This time, however, he is delighted (or as delighted as she has ever seen him). She looks at him inquisitively, wondering what on her new green earth could possibly have brought him to the point of grinning at her like a fool, and he says, "Your sky. It's perfect."

She looks upward and smiles, too, because she had caught him looking upward with a frown for the past three practice runs, and this sky was for him, and his detailed eye. (She will never tell him this, at least not in this world, and at _very _least not before they delve into a mind other than his own.)


	4. Lost Scene

"Focus!" Eames is shouting at her, but Arthur can see the lines of concentration split her forehead as she raises a hand toward the tottering structure as if she will support it with her own strength, and he feels as if her tension roots him to the ground. Eames is still lecturing, in that singularly dry way of his, but Arthur can tell that Ariadne hasn't heard a word he's been saying. The skyscraper plunges toward them - and then stops, twists in midair into a Golden-Ratio spiral, hanging like art against the wall of her perfected sky. Even Eames stands awestruck and silent.

There is a _snap_ from across the way as a horde of city projections storm toward them, and the hanging spiral shudders, shakes, as Eames' subconscious riots against Ariadne's artistry, and in moments they are plunged into the blackness of collapsing mortar and stone and shattered glass.

When they all three jerk upward, Ariadne looks around as if still caught in Eames' mind, fumbling for her totem with sleep-muddled inaccuracy. When Eames comments on her work, she frowns, and Arthur realizes that she can't remember. Her own creation, lost to her own exhaustion, a lost scene that neither he nor Eames will ever be able to recover.

(The thought saddens him immensely, but he cannot bring himself to say it.)


	5. Degrees

Cobb is speaking, and she is paying perfect attention even as her eyes travel other planes.

_The junction of his neck and shoulders is 36._

_The crease of his elbow (at the moment) is 45._

_The tilt of his chair is 100 (far too many) -_ and she asks her questions, the devoted student.

She laughs as Eames abruptly snaps the chair down.

"This, Ariadne, would be a kick."

(Perhaps it is just her imagination, but the pointed glare Arthur shoots at him is a perfect right angle.)


	6. Seize the Day

Scribbled tightly into the corner of the cover of her notebook are the words _carpe diem_. In the middle of the night, as she works hunched over the blocks and patterns taking shape beneath her capable hands, she catches sight of those words, in the corner of her eye, and breathes more quickly. The adrenaline rush she feels is similar to a kick, whenever she recalls the full meaning of the task at hand.

She is usually last to leave the workshop, save Cobb, and when she walks the streets of Paris with dawn breaking across her body, she can hear those words ringing through her mind as if her own projections are repeating them: _seize the day._


	7. Opposite

He is standing opposite Eames, feet planted widely on a steely blank plane. His hands are in his pockets and he is as impassive as ever, wondering what all of this is about.

Eames, who is still holding a toothpick between his teeth, even in dreamspace, removes it long enough to say, "Mate, you're watching her a bit too close, aren't you?"

He pretends not to know what the other is talking about, but (irritating, or no) Eames has him read like a book, so he says she is interesting. Merely interesting? She's his polar opposite - but no, Eames, it could never be more than that.

When they wake, Ariadne asks them what it was that they practiced. (It does not help that they give her different answers.)


	8. Connection

In one of their meetings with the rest of the team, their eyes meet and it seems to him that ideas spring across the connection of their sight, and the feeling is electric.

He calls to mind his words with Eames and drops his eyes first, studying his notes as earnestly as he is able, because that moment of electricity has the strength to shake the foundation of every dream that he has ever had.


	9. Lull and Storm

Arthur can feel the tension between Ariadne and Cobb. He, the Point Man, the one who prides himself on knowing every intimate detail of, well, everything, has no idea what it is that has made them so... high strung. He thinks that it is something to do with the first dream they shared, but he can't pry a single fact from either of them.

Sometimes they seem to have an understanding, other times he watches as Ariadne stares at Dom as if he'll explode at a moment's notice. It makes him want to stand between the two of them, because he's felt the shrapnel of Cobb's destruction before, but a second part of him recalls that she simply won't let him. He sits and rides out the lull and storm and waits for her to allow him to protect her.


	10. Animal

_You have never felt the blood of another before, and you find it hot, slick, alien, even terrifying _(For that matter, he has never looked so dishevelled, and his head is just inches from resting on your knee),_ and your hands are stained red and cradling both sides of a face you_ (although you will not admit it) _dreamt of cradling in a very different way. The sound of Arthur's breathing is so horribly irregular _(you did not realize it, but his rhythms have begun to define yours)_ and it leaves you unable to catch your breath or understand the strange asymmetry of his beaten body. You look up at the sound of a hammer clicking back, and Eames pulls the trigger once to release the Point Man back into reality. _(He looks feral, you think, like an animal, after the beating he dealt so few moments before, and it makes you wonder what it is that he can do when he wakes.)

_"Pain," says the Forger, "Is all in the mind, Ariadne."_


	11. Children

In her dream, Arthur hears children laughing, as if from far away. She pretends not to hear it, he thinks, sees her turn away from the sound, and some part of him thinks - James? Philippa? - but she has already begun to raise towers and arches, and the sound of grating stone buries all others.

Her back is ramrod straight and his shoulders slope with a sadness that he cannot name.


	12. We All Float On

You wonder what will happen, after this is over, when the world ends or begins or lurches onward and steps on your name in the process. There are ten billion stars in this sky alone, and they spin madly around the earth, filled with more purpose than you can feel at the moment, and you cannot reconcile a single thought. (This is the madness that overtakes Cobb, you think, the insanity that draws the shade of a dead woman into his dreams and the sounds of screaming whistles and laughing children into the world they all inhabit.) Some small sound breaks across your ear and you rock back into yourself, back into the lines and angles that you know so well as you realign with the body you sometimes feel as if you no longer inhabit.

Three deep breaths of cold Parisian air. _Three steps and all these levels and we all float on._


	13. Chess

_You will wonder, one day, what would have happened had you chosen a pawn, a rook, a queen; you will wonder one day how they would have fallen, how they would have sounded when they collided with the floor of these places in which you wake, how they would sit in your hand and absorb your heat as if you were the sun, how their polished surfaces would have accumulated nicks and scratches. You will wonder how your face would look reflected in the gold skin of any other piece, and you will press this true one into your skin and you will look across a bishop-dented table top at him, and you will smile. _

_He will call you queen once, and you will correct him, but sh, be still. All this you need not know - not now, not when your mind is a labyrinth, Ariadne, and Theseus waits at its end._


	14. Duty

_He cannot remember how he got here, but he cannot recall that this means that he is dreaming, and he is eighteen and terrified with his back pressed against a wall that does not exist._

_Yes he will serve, yes he will bend his will to that of the screaming man before him, yes yes yes because _this -_ this is his duty, but this baffling mixture of chaos and order cannot filter through his senses and something in him recalls that he was not this frightened when this happened, but for some reason he cannot feel right in this memory -_

When he wakes, he deciphers his own fears and tells himself over and over not to worry: he will never have to go back to _before_.


	15. Rip

_Non, je ne regrette rien_ are the words that rip him from that world to this, and she watches him hear those bars of music. They filter to her ears, but she is focused intently on the light that ignites behind his eyes that she hardly processes them. His precision becomes driven in a way that she cannot describe, like an arrow shot from a bow, and he flies directly to his target, defying those reverberating verses in the only way he knows how.__

When they wake she has the English of those words ringing in her head without explanation.  
_  
No - I regret nothing.  
_


	16. Missing Time

**A/N: Hello, my darling readers. I must beg your forgiveness for being so late in updating: the holidays were crazy. In any case, without any further ado, here is the next in the series. I hope you're all enjoying them! Let me know what you think in the reviews, please? As always... if I could, I would say that I planted the idea for _Inception_ in Nolan's mind. Sadly I did not, and therefore I must content myself with drabbles. Happy reading. 3

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**

_One day, in the not so very distant future, when you cry, he will hold you closely and tell you sh, it was just a dream. _  
_You will not believe him._

But today you sit with your back wedged against the headboard in the stillness and quiet of your dormitory (everyone else is on holiday, you are embarking across the world and across a consciousness), and trace the shape of your bishop with a subtly trembling hand. Cold metal. Smooth edges. Weight just so.

_On that day, you will bury your face in the collar you would never have thought capable of wrinkling, and your ribs will notch (not unpleasantly) in puzzle piece edges against his, and you will miss the time when you never had to think in terms of shooting your lover (half of a whole) in the head. _

When you enter the airport with your back straight and your carry on packed to his perfect standards, your shoulders soften and curve around the fear in your chest, because he meets your eye (just once) in the ticket line, and you can see all of the strength and will that he gives to you.

_In that future day, you will think of this moment and cry even more violently into his collar and he will press his lips to your forehead and say nothing._


	17. Crest

_Shock._

It rises in him like a wave, washing through his veins and foaming at each contact point, even as his outward self remains perfectly controlled, a precision instrument.

_This was your job, God damn it!  
_

(And good God, doesn't he know it? Doesn't he realize it?)

_This was your responsibility!  
_

(Behind Eames, her eyes are wide and frightened, and she looks smaller than ever)

_That all-encompassing wave of horror crests and breaks behind his eyes and for the five hundred and fifty sixth time he swears to himself that he will get it right, he will always get it right, because this is how much it matters, how much is at stake._

(She will not descend, because he will not let her.)


	18. Itch

**A/N: Drabble number 20! Thank you all for sticking with me so long, and I apologize for taking so long to post this one. The holidays have been extremely busy! But now, I can promise that there are more to come, and let me know what you think of these so far. Much love, jessisparks.

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**

You have never been good at waiting (don't hold your breath, darling, you never will be, I have watched you attempt many times), and now is no different, as you stand guard over Saito's failing body.

There is something (emphasis on the _thing_) at the back of your mind that is longing to emerge, to shift the dreamscape you designed into something to protect you, a maze so convoluted that only you its maker could possibly navigate it, and that _thing _itches like pollen on the inside of your skull.

You push it away. Today, of all days, you will remain still, force that composure you've mastered over the years, the mask of maturity that conceals your childlike wonder in the world you inhabit.

_(For the moment, Ariadne, this world is not yours, so be still, and keep pressure on that wound.)__  
_


	19. Explode

Every move he makes in this dream (and in every dream he has ever worked) is directed in cold silver lines, shooting like needles into his next action, and he can see the points of course spiderwebbing across the concrete floors of this warehouse. In his eyes, the dreamscape shines in pale light and he can see every crack and detail of his own actions in all of the minutes before they occur.

And even though he has been seeing these lines for years, he still smiles at the silver lining of the cloud of smoke that rises when Eames' shot explodes the projection across the way.


End file.
